The great flood disaster in the Australian state of Queensland
continues, but as it begins its big clean-up and recovery phase, a
picture of emergency communications provided by radio amateurs is
starting to emerge.

Initial reports from Ewan McLeod VK4ERM, the WIA National WICEN Coordinator, are that HF links were requested by Queensland's Water Police from Brisbane to Cairns.

Other WICEN help was given to the Townsville and
Rockhampton regions pending repair of Telstra of its fibre optic cables
to north.

Widespread power and communication disruption will take a number of days work by repair crews.

No more is immediately known about WICEN and its emergency role, but this should be learnt in coming days.

At least six people have died in Queensland. Others are missing.

Many thousands are homeless and sheltering in relief centres, while some towns remain inundated and isolated.

The weather system, ex-tropical cyclone Oswald that caused
record flooding in many areas, has moved south to affect many parts of
New South Wales.

It
wasn't the slickest of plans. Femi Adeyemi had been made redundant from his job
as an online manager for a fashion company. He was 28 years old and soon found
the days were skidding past: "I didn't know what I was going to do. I had
a girlfriend at the time who worked in a bar with a little space that wasn't
being used," he says.

"I
asked the owner one night what he was doing with it and he said, 'What did you
have in mind?'. On the spot I said, 'I'm going to set up a radio station'. It
was the first thing that came into my head. He said, 'Go on then'."

Once
the panic had subsided, Adeyemi set to work, digging deep into his archive of
musically-mindedfriends. For his first show, he signed up a bloke called
Martin whom he'd met at a party the night before.

It was
April 2011 that the volume was turned up on NTS Live for the first time, with a
four-hour session of Sunday-night-friendly house and electro. Eighteen months
later, Martin is a distant memory, but NTS is here to stay.

Today,
Adeyemi has eight staff members at the station's HQ at a suitably trendy spot
in Dalston, east London.
They are applying the finishing touches to an exciting new project. Following
on from a musical extravaganza in New York City
in 2012, NTS is heading to Krakow for the next
instalment of a programme that sees local DJs and cultural know-it-alls lead a
10-day exposé of the music scene in selected cities. After Krakow, Tokyo and Sydney
are next on the hit-list.

NTS, a
purely internet-based station, already blasts its unique medley of
non-mainstream music and random chit-chat to 10,000 listeners a day – exporting
150 presenters in the process. They include Leyla Pillai, whose slot, 'Who's
That Girl', focuses on a different female artist each week, and the eponymous,
'James's Show', which has been known to fill a whole hour with nothing but
static noise.

The
key to NTS's success, Adeyemi says, is the element of surprise – and if you
don't like what you hear when you switch on, there is a whole back-catalogue of
podcasts on their website to choose from.

The
smart kit the station uses to trace its listeners already shows little black
blobs in Russia, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Nigeria, the United States,
France and Germany – with more appearing every day. This goes some way to
explaining why the presenters on the station pay for, rather than get paid for,
their time on-air, to the tune of £25 to £50 a month.

"Lots
of these guys want to be professional DJs, so they use this as a platform to
get themselves out there. It's a tough game to get in to…" Adeyemi says.
"This way, you get heard and you can end up getting lots of bookings and
make that money back tenfold."

Now
big brands, too, are queuing up to bask in the station's glory. Nike and Red
Bull are among those who pay to have their events broadcast through the hippest
station in town.

The
majority of presenters on NTS are from, or live in, the Hackney area, and with
a little help from the internet they are beaming their collective voice to all
corners of the globe

.

But in
villages, towns and cities across Britain, local people are clubbing
together to create a more intimate conversation.

There
are now some 200 community radio stations filtering through airwaves across Britain,
according to a new report from Ofcom. These local projects, which operate
through tune-in FM frequencies rather than online, cover small areas and serve
the needs of a specific population.

Melton
Mowbray is a picturesque Leicestershire town, best known for its world famous
pork pies. It is also home to 103 The Eye, the first community radio station to
be awarded a licence by Ofcom, back in 2005.

Since
then, the station, which is run entirely by volunteers, has gone 24-hour,
broadcasting from a range of premises, including a school and various
presenters' living rooms. "This morning, as part of our Sunday community
focus programme, we had someone on from Vineyard Church in Melton, then a lady
came on to talk about a new food bank being established in town, followed by a
local councillor and a member of the rotary club talking about their charity
club," explains the station's co-managing director, Christine Slomkowska.

There
are 45 presenters on The Eye, their ages spanning 16 to 77. Their voices echo
across an area home to some 80,000 people – through Melton Mowbray, past the
Vale of Belvoir and beyond to Rushcliffe. "We are the community,"
Slomkowska says. "What we can offer that others can't is localness. We
give a voice to people that a larger station could not."

29 January, 2013, BBC
World Service has announced the launch of new mobile sites for BBC Indonesia
and BBC Hausa in Responsive Design – a technology which tests mobile users’
screen sizes and ensures they download the most optimised version for their
device.

With the launch of these two “responsive”
sites, all mobile users who visit the BBC Indonesia and BBC Hausa mobile sites
automatically will be routed to the mobile optimised versions, thus getting the
best possible user experience their device can deliver.

James Montgomery,
Controller of Digital and Technology, BBC Global News, says: “These are
milestones in the digital development of BBC World Service. This technology -
already adopted on the BBC’s international news website, bbc.com/news - unlocks
our ability to deliver the very best mobile user-experience. It is particularly
well suited for BBC World Service, whose audiences use a huge variety of
handset types to access our content, from newest editions of smartphones to
low-tech ‘feature’ phones.”

The BBC is at the
forefront of the move into Responsive Design in the Asian and African mobile
news markets. In February, BBC World Service is planning to launch this
technology for its Russian-language news website, bbcrussian.com.

We
would like to petition the Broadcasting Governing Body in the UK to clear and
provide 3-5 FM radio channels for motorists using iPods and transmittors while
driving. It is impossible for people now to find a clear channel to tune their devices
to.

We would like to address this issue with great urgency and millions of UK
drivers are affected by this and we need to get this formalised.

Is their anyone else who feel this way? How can we proceed with this in a
formal way? DO we need to start a petition and send it to the Government? Any
ideas and suggestions welcomed.

JIQUILISCO,
El Salvador, Jan 16 2013 (IPS)- For the first
time in El Salvador,
a community radio is broadcasting under its own licence. The struggle
continues, however, for legislative change that will give these kinds of
broadcasters more airspace.

After
years of challenges, Radio Mangle finally began broadcasting this week to over
200 communities in the area known as Bajo Lempa, in the municipality
of Jiquilisco, in the south of the province of Usulután.

“This
is a historic moment, the result of years of hard work and social pressure,”
radio presenter Mario Martínez, coordinator of the Mangle Association, which
developed the project, told IPS. As of Jan. 14, the radio station is
broadcasting on 106.1 FM from the community of Ciudad Romero, in the El Zamorán
district of Jiquilisco.

In
October, the state-run General Superintendence of Electricity and
Telecommunications (SIGET) awarded this frequency to a public agency, which
transferred it to Radio Mangle, making it the first community radio in the
country to obtain a licence. Since then, the Mangle Association has been busy
preparing for its maiden broadcast.

The
emergence of community radios in El Salvador dates back to 1992, at
the end of the 12-year civil war, when opportunities for sharing opinions and
dissent opened up. But these radios have faced issues for lacking permits; some
radio stations have been closed down and violently evicted from their premises
by the police.

The
Telecommunications Law of 1997 tacitly allows community radio stations to
operate, but they must acquire their frequencies through public auctions,
putting them at a disadvantage with respect to business media groups